Qualia explained away

A Commentary on Daniel C. Dennett

David H. Baßler

In his paper “Why and how does consciousness seem the way it seems?”, Daniel Commentator
Dennett argues that philosophers and scientists should abandon Ned Block’s dis-
tinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. First he
David H. Baßler
lays out why the assumption of phenomenal consciousness as a second medium is
davidhbassler @ gmail.com
not a reasonable idea. In a second step he shows why beings like us must be con-
vinced that there are qualia, that is, why we have the strong temptation to believe Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
in their existence. This commentary is exclusively concerned with this second part Mainz, Germany
of the target paper. In particular, I offer a more detailed picture, guided by five
questions that are not addressed by Dennett. My proposal, however, still resides Target Author
within the framework of Dennett’s philosophy in general. In particular I use the
notion of intentional systems of different orders to fill in some details. I tell the Daniel C. Dennett
counterfactual story of some first-order intentional systems evolving to become daniel.dennett @ tufts.edu
believers in qualia as building blocks of their world. Tufts University
Medford, MA, U.S.A.
Keywords
Dispositions | Intentional systems | Predictive processing | Qualia | Zombic hunch Editors

Thomas Metzinger
metzinger @ uni-mainz.de
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
Mainz, Germany

Jennifer M. Windt
jennifer.windt @ monash.edu
Monash University
Melbourne, Australia

1 Introduction

The first of Rapoport’s Rules1 for composing a
critical commentary states that one should
present the target view in the most charitable
way possible (Dennett 2013a). Although I gen-
erally agree with many of Daniel Dennett’s
1 Dennett named these rules after social psychologist and game theor-
ist Anatol Rapaport. They are not to be confused with another “Ra-
poport’s Rule”, named after Eduardo H. Rapaport (cf. Stevens
1989). Here is the full list of Dennett’s Rapaport’s Rules:
1. “You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so
clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, ‘Thanks, I wish I’d
thought of putting it that way.’”
2. “You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are
not matters of general or widespread agreement).”
3. “You should mention anything you have learned from your target.”
4. “Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebut-
tal or criticism.”
(Dennett 2013a, p. 33)
views, especially his argument against the exist-
ence of qualia (constituting the first part of the
target paper), the diagnosis that there is the
zombic hunch,2 along with his strategy for ex-
plaining why it exists, the connection between
qualia and predicted dispositions, was hard to
grasp. Dennett presents the idea that when we
talk about qualia, what we really refer to are
our dispositions in earlier works (e.g., Dennett
1991). But the connection to predictive pro-
2 A philosophical zombie has nothing to do with any other sort of
zombie. It behaves in every way like a normal person. The only dif-
ference is, that it lacks phenomenal experiences (though ex hypothesi
it believes that is has phenomenal experiences). The zombic hunch is
the intuition that a philosophical zombie would be different from us.

Baßler, D. H. (2015). Qualia explained away - A Commentary on Daniel C. Dennett.

In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570542 1 | 11

cessing is new (see also Dennett 2013b). There
still seem to be some stepping stones missing,
which I hope to fill in with my reconstruction.
My goal is to provide a complete story that
sticks as close to Dennett’s argument as pos-
sible. This paper is not supposed to be a “re-
buttal” or “criticism”, but an “attempt to re-ex-
press [Dennett]’s position” (see footnote 1).
The structure of this commentary is as
follows: in the first section I shall give a short
outline of Dennett’s explanation of why we
have the zombic hunch. Since this involves the
predictive processing framework, I shall give a
very short introduction to this first. Following
this, I present a short list of five questions
that have not, in my opinion, yet been suffi-
ciently addressed. In the second section I
present an interpretation, or perhaps an ex-
tension, of Dennett’s answers to these ques-
tions, by relying on the concept of an inten-
tional system and using a strategy involving
telling the counterfactual story of the evolu-
tion of some agents who end up believing in
qualia (although ex hypothesi there are none).
In the third section I shall analyze which fea-
tures qualia should have, according to the be-
liefs of these agents, and show that there is at
least a significant overlap with features many
consider qualia to have.
I want to give a short justification for
the unorthodox way of accounting for beliefs
about x instead of for x’s existence itself. This
is a general strategy found in other areas of
Dennett’s work. For example, he has asked,
“Why should we think there is intentionality
although there is none?” (Dennett 1971),
“Why should we believe there is a god al-
though there is none?” (Dennett 2006), and
“Why should we think there is a problem with
determinism and free will although there is
none?” (Dennett 1984, 2004). Dennett’s philo-
sophy can in parts be seen as a therapeutic
approach to “philosopher’s syndrome”—“mis-
taking failures of imagination for insights into
necessity” (e.g., Dennett 1991, p. 401; Dennett
1998a, p. 366)—by making it easier to see why
we are convinced of the existence of some-
thing, even when there are good reasons to
believe that it doesn’t exist.
Baßler, D. H. (2015). Qualia explained away - A Commentary on Daniel C. Dennett.
In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570542
www.open-mind.net
I want to draw attention to Hume’s Of
Miracles (Hume 1995, X), where he states
that the likelihood of a testimony about mir-
acles being wrong is always greater than the
likelihood of the miracle itself. This serves as
a nice analogy for the case at hand: we might
think of our own mind as a good “witness”,
but we already know too much about its
shortcomings. So we should be suspicious
when it cries out for a revolution in science or
metaphysics, because this cry rests on the be-
lief that something is missing, when no data
but this very belief itself makes the demand
necessary. Instead we should examine what
else could have led our minds to form this
conviction.
2 Dennett’s proposal
In “Why and how does consciousness seem the
way it seems?” Dennett gives an argument for
why philosophers and scientists should aban-
don Ned Block’s distinction between access
consciousness and phenomenal consciousness,
zombies, and qualia altogether. The argument
is twofold: first Dennett lays down his argu-
ment for why the assumption of phenomenal
consciousness as a second medium whose states
are conscious experiences or qualia is “scien-
tifically insupportable and deeply misleading”
(Dennett this collection, section 2). It is insup-
portable because there is simply no need to
posit such entities to explain any of our beha-
vior, so for reasons of parsimony they should
not be a part of scientific theories (see also
Dennett 1991, p. 134). The assumption is
deeply misleading because it makes us look for
the wrong things, namely, the objects our judg-
ments are about, rather than the causes of
these judgments, which are nothing like these
objects.
In a second step Dennett shows why
creatures like us must be convinced that there
are qualia, that is, why we have such a strong
temptation to believe in their existence, even
though there are no good reasons for this (Den-
nett this collection, section 2 and 3; other places
where Dennett acknowledges this conviction,
the zombic hunch, are Dennett 1999; Dennett
2 | 11

2005, Ch. 1; Dennett 2013a, p. 283). The follow-
ing sections are exclusively concerned with this
part of the target paper.
After completing the second step, Dennett
explains why we ascribe qualia their character-
istic properties—simplicity and ineffability
(Dennett this collection, section 4 & 5). Al-
though I also say something about this point
(see section 4), Section 6 is an intuition pump
(cf. e.g., Dennett 2013a) that will help the
reader to apply Dennett’s alternative view to
the experience of colors.
Before I present a short outline of Den-
nett’s second step, I want to briefly describe the
predictive processing framework. This is neces-
sary since both Dennett’s argument as well as
my reconstruction make use of this framework. I
shall not go into details of hierarchical predict-
ive processing (PP) accounts here, since at least
three papers in this collection (Clark, Hohwy,
and Seth), as well as the associated commentar-
ies (Madary, Harkness, and Wiese), are con-
cerned with this topic and also offer ample ref-
erences for introductory as well as further read-
ing. I will instead give a very short description
of the points that are most relevant to Den-
nett’s argument and recommend the above-men-
tioned papers and the references given there to
the interested reader.
2.1 Predictive processing
In the PP framework, the brain refines an in-
ternal generative stochastic model of the
world by continuously comparing sensory in-
put (extero- as well as interoceptive) with pre-
dictions continuously created by the model.
The overall model is spread across a hierarchy
of layers, where the sensory layer is the lowest
and each layer tries to predict (that is, to sup-
press) the activation pattern of the layer be-
neath it. The whole top-down activation pat-
tern might be interpreted as a global hypo-
thesis about the hidden causes of ongoing
sensory stimulation. The difference between
predicted and actual activation (prediction er-
ror) is what gets propagated up the hierarchy
and leads to changes in the hypothesis. To be
exact, this is only one possibility. Another is
Baßler, D. H. (2015). Qualia explained away - A Commentary on Daniel C. Dennett.
In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570542
www.open-mind.net
that this leads to an action that changes the
input in such a way that the prediction is vin-
dicated (active inference, see e.g., Friston et
al. 2011). However, although this aspect of PP
—that it provides one formally-unified ap-
proach to perception and action—is a strength
of the framework, it is not important here,
given the context of this commentary. These
changes are supposed to follow Bayes’ The-
orem, which is why one might speak of
Bayesian prediction (cf. e.g., Hohwy 2013).
The higher the layer in the hierarchy the
more abstract the contents and the longer the
time-scales or the predictive horizon. One ex-
ample of a very abstract content is “only one
object can exist in the same place at the same
time” (Hohwy et al. 2008, p. 691, quoted after
Clark 2013, p. 5).
One point to keep in mind is that, accord-
ing to Hohwy (2014), this framework implies a
clear-cut distinction between the mind and the
world. That is, there is an evidentiary boundary
between “where the prediction error minimiza-
tion occurs” and “hidden causes [of the sensory
stimulation pattern] on the other side” (Hohwy
2014, p. 7). I will come back to this point later
in this commentary.
2.2 The outline of Dennett’s argument
1. Our own dispositions, expectations, etc. are
part of the generative self-model instantiated
by our brains. “We ought to have good
Bayesian expectations about what we will do
next, what we will think next, and what we
will expect next” (Dennett this collection, p.
5)
2. When our brains do their job (described in
(1)) correctly, i.e., there are no prediction-er-
ror signals, we misidentify dispositions of the
organism with properties of another object.
For instance, instead of attributing the dis-
position to cuddle a baby correctly to the or-
ganism having the disposition, our brain at-
tributes “cuteness” to the baby.3 Color qualia
3 “Think of the cuteness of babies. It is not, of course, an ‘intrinsic’
property of babies, though it seems to be. […][W]e expect to expect
to feel the urge to cuddle it and so forth. When our expectations are
fulfilled, the absence of prediction error signals is interpreted as con-
firmation that, indeed, the thing in the world with which we are in-
3 | 11

and other types of qualia also belong to this
category.4
3. This means, under a personal level descrip-
tion, that we believe that there are properties
independent of the observer, such as the cute-
ness of babies, the sweetness of apples, or the
blueness of the sky, etc.
4. This is why it is so hard for us to doubt that
qualia exist in the real world.
The crucial points seem to be (1) and (2). Be-
fore I lay out my interpretation I want to high-
light some points that are not addressed in
Dennett (this collection), but which are crucial
if we are to have a complete picture. In the sec-
tion Our Bayesian brains, I present a recon-
struction that addresses these issues.
2.3 Five questions
1. Why do we need to monitor our dis-
positions? As noted in Dennett (2010), self-
monitoring, in the sense of monitoring of our
dispositions, values, etc., isn’t needed unless
one needs to communicate and to hide and
share specific information about oneself at
will. In his paper, Dennett does not address
this issue, yet presupposes that “among the
things in our Umwelt that matter to our well-
being are ourselves”. This is obvious if one
reads “ourselves” as the motions of our bod-
ies, but not so obvious if one includes things
teracting has the properties we expected it to have”
(Dennett this collection, p. 5).
4 The intuition pump of Mr. Clapgras in Dennett’s section 6 is there
to make the point that colors can be seen as dispositional properties
of the organism rather than as properties of perceptual objects, in
the same way as cuteness. Whether one is convinced by this or not,
the intuitive problem seems to be the same: science tells us there are
no properties like cuteness or color, while the zombic hunch tells us
that this cannot be true. A more detailed discussion can be found in
Dennett (1991, p. 375). I will not go into this here, but for the sake
of argument I shall assume that this admittedly counter-intuitive
categorization is acceptable. The reader’s willingness to accept it
might be helped by the following point given by Nicholas Humphrey,
which reminds us that although at first thought colors do not seem
to have action-provoking effects (like cuteness or funniness), after
second thought one might think differently:
“As I look around the room I’m working in, man-made colour shouts
back at me from every surface: books, cushions, a rug on the floor, a
coffee-cup, a box of staples—bright blues, reds, yellows, greens.
There is as much colour here as in any tropical forest. Yet while al-
most every colour in the forest would be meaningful, here in my
study almost nothing is. Colour anarchy has taken over.”
(Humphrey 1983, p. 149; quoted in Dennett 1991, p. 384).
Baßler, D. H. (2015). Qualia explained away - A Commentary on Daniel C. Dennett.
In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570542
www.open-mind.net
like “what we will think next, and what we
will expect next”, as Dennett does (Dennett
this collection, p. 5). The next question is
concerned with this latter form of self-monit-
oring:
2. How is self-monitoring accomplished?
Hohwy (2014) refers to an evidential
boundary in the predictive processing
framework (see the section 2.1): there is a
clear distinction between the mind/brain
and the world (of which the body without
the brain is a part), whose causal structure
is yet to be revealed. Our expectations are
part of our mind, which, if talk of the
boundary is correct, does not have direct
access to its own states as its own states—
the mind is a black box to itself. So the
prediction of its expectations needs to be
indirect (just like the predictions of the
causes of the sensory stimulation in gen-
eral), and therefore the question arises how
the self-monitoring of the mind is achieved
according to Dennett. There is a further
concern with self-monitoring, which one
might call the “acquisition constraint” (cf.
e.g., Metzinger 2003, p. 344):
3. How did this self-monitoring evolve in
a gradual fashion? Large parts of Breaking
the Spell are dedicated to making under-
standable how “belief in belief” could have
evolved over the centuries, beginning long be-
fore the appearance of any religion. Dennett’s
goal here is quite similar: the explanation
aims to make understandable how we came
to believe in qualia, etc. But a step-by-step
explanation is missing. I consider this form of
the acquisition-constraint one of the most
crucial for any satisfying explanation of this
sort: each single step has to be understand-
able as one likely to have happened. One
reason for this is that it would support a
more fine-grained and mechanistic under-
standing; another is that it would satisfy the
gradualism-constraint of Darwinism, which
says that minds (just like anything else)
“must have come into existence gradually, by
steps that are barely discernible even in ret-
rospect” (Dennett 1995, p. 200, emphasis in
original).
4 | 11

Once we know why and how our brains ac-
complish the task of monitoring our disposi-
tions and how they came to do so, one might
still wonder why (as claimed in point 2, page
3) exactly these abstract properties of the or-
ganism would be misidentified as concrete
properties of other things:
4. Why do we misidentify our disposi-
tions? One of Dennett’s central claims is
that we misidentify our own dispositions,
which leads to belief in qualia.5 Although
misidentification seems to be ubiquitous (see
superstition, religion, magic tricks, the rub-
ber hand illusion—Botvinick & Cohen 1998;
and even full body illusions—Blanke & Met-
zinger 2009) it nonetheless requires a special
explanation in each case: is this a shortcom-
ing of a system that has no disadvantages, or
is it even something that benefits the system
in some way (cf. McKay & Dennett 2009)?
Keeping this last possibility in mind one
might ask:
5. Why are we so attached to the idea of
qualia? There seems to be something more
that leads people to believe in qualia. There
is the intuition that without qualia we
would be very different—we would be
“mere machines”, we could not enjoy things
like a good meal or the smell of the air
after it rains (a discussion of this character-
istic of beliefs-about-qualia can be found in
Dennett 1991, p. 383). Some might go fur-
ther and say that our whole morality rests
on the existence of qualia of pain and suf-
fering (this worry is dealt with in Dennett
1991, p. 449). However, what I am con-
cerned with here is not whether it is true
that qualia are the basis of our morality,
but why we should think them to be so.
From the argument presented by Dennett it
is not clear why we are so attached to the
idea of qualia. It is not obvious why we do
not react as disinterestedly to their denial
as we did to the revelation that there is no
5 What qualia are […] are just those complexes of dispositions. When you say
‘This is my quale,’ what you are singling out, or referring to, whether you real-
ize it or not, is your idiosyncratic complex of dispositions. You seem to be re-
ferring to a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind’s eye, a private
shadeshade of homogeneous pink, but this is just how it seems to you, not
how it is. (Dennett 1991, p. 389).
Baßler, D. H. (2015). Qualia explained away - A Commentary on Daniel C. Dennett.
In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570542
www.open-mind.net
ether.6 But, as a matter of fact, we react
differently: this is not like when any other
entity, posited for theoretical reasons, is
shown to not exist; it is as if without qualia
we couldn’t possibly be us.
3 An interpretation
3.1 Intentional Systems Theory
An important part of what follows is Intentional
Systems Theory (IST). What is crucial here is
that according to IST, all there is to being an
agent in the sense of having beliefs and desires
upon which to act is to be describable via a cer-
tain strategy: the intentional stance. The inten-
tional stance is a “theory-neutral way of captur-
ing the cognitive competences of different or-
ganisms (or other agents) without committing
the investigator to overspecific hypotheses
about the internal structures that underlie the
competences” (Dennett 2009, p. 344). If one
predicts the behavior of an object via the inten-
tional stance, one presupposes that it is optim-
ally designed to achieve certain goals. If there
are divergences from the optimal path, one can,
in a lot of cases, correct for this by introducing
abstract entities or false beliefs. Since there are
presumably no 100%-optimally-behaving
creatures in the world, every intentional profile
(a set of beliefs and desires), generated via ad-
option of the intentional stance, contains a sub-
set of false beliefs.7 It seems that humans have a
“generative capacity [to find the patterns re-
vealed by taking the intentional stance] that is
to some degree innate in normal people” (Den-
nett 2009, p. 342). I will come back to this
point and its connection to PP in the next sec-
tion.
Let us assume for the sake of argument
that IST gives a correct explanation of what it
is to be an agent (in the sense of someone who
has beliefs and desires and acts according to
6 This property of the beliefs is acknowledged in Dennett (2005), p.
22, fn 18: “[The Zombic Hunch] is visceral in the sense of being al -
most entirely arational, insensitive to argument or the lack thereof”.
7 See Dennett (1987) for an elaborate discussion of the intentional
stance and its implications, Dennett 1998b for the ontological status
of beliefs and desires, Bechtel (1985) for another interesting inter-
pretation, and Yu & Fuller (1986) for a discussion of the benefits of
treating beliefs and desires as abstracta.
5 | 11

them), and that PP allows us to see how an
agent can be implemented on the “algorithmic
level”(see Dennett’s discussion in Dennett 1987,
p. 74, where he refers to the IST as a “compet-
ence model”). Whenever I say that an agent be-
lieves, wants, desires, etc. something I mean it
in exactly the sense found in IST.
Intentional systems can be further categor-
ized by looking at the content of their beliefs,
e.g., a second-order intentional system is an in-
tentional system that has beliefs and/or desires
about beliefs and/or desires, that is, it is itself
able to take an intentional stance towards ob-
jects (Dennett 1987, p. 243). A first-order inten-
tional system has (or can be described as hav-
ing) beliefs and desires; a second-order inten-
tional system can ascribe beliefs to others and
itself. If something is a second-order intentional
system it harbors beliefs such as “Peggy be-
lieves that there’s cheese in the fridge”. But tak-
ing the intentional stance towards an object is
an ability that comes in degrees. I now want to
describe what one might call an intentional sys-
tem of 1.5th order, an intermediate between
first- and second-order intentional systems. This
is a system that is not able to ascribe full-
fledged desires and beliefs with arbitrary con-
tents to others or itself. We, as intentional sys-
tems of high order, have no difficulty in ascrib-
ing beliefs and desires with very arbitrary con-
tents, such as “She wants to ride a unicorn and
believes that following Pegasus is a good way to
achieve that goal”. But the content of beliefs
and desires that such an intentional system of
1.5th order can ascribe should be constrained in
the following way:
1. An intentional system of 1.5th order is able to
ascribe desires only in a very particular and
concrete manner, i.e., actions that the object
in question wants to perform with certain
particular existing objects, that the system
itself knows about (e.g., the desire to eat the
carrot over there), but not goals directed at
nonexistent objects, described by sentences
like “he wants to build a house”, or objects
the ascriber itself does not know about.
2. It is only able to ascribe beliefs to others
that it holds itself. That means it is able to
Baßler, D. H. (2015). Qualia explained away - A Commentary on Daniel C. Dennett.
In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570542
www.open-mind.net
take the basic intentional stance with the de-
fault assumption that the target object in
question believes whatever is true (if we as-
sume the ascriber’s beliefs are in fact all
true), but lacks the ability to correct the
ascriptions if it leads to wrong predictions for
the behavior of the target. A real-world ex-
ample can be found in Marticorena et al.
(2011): rhesus macaques in a false belief task
can correctly predict what a person will do,
given that the person knows where the object
is hidden and they have seen the person get-
ting to know this. They can also tell when a
person doesn’t have the right knowledge, but
they cannot use this information to make a
prediction about where the person will look.
The implementation of such an intermediate
between first- and second-order intentional sys-
tems can be easily imagined following predictive
coding principles, as I will soon show. Following
this, I argue that this sets down the basic fun-
daments for systems evolving from this position
to be believers in qualia, etc.
The reason for introducing this idea is
that I want to show how, given predictive pro-
cessing principles and a certain selection pres-
sure, a 1.5th-order-intentional-system might de-
velop from a first-order-intentional-system. In a
next step, I will argue that under an altered se-
lection pressure such a system might become a
full-fledged nth-order-intentional-system, where n
is greater or equal to two. Systems evolving in
such a way, as I will describe, are bound to be-
lieve in the existence of something like qualia.
In some sense this is only a just-so story, but
the assumed selection pressures are very plaus-
ible, and the empirically-correct answer might
not be too far away from this.
3.2 Our Bayesian brains8
To see how the pieces fit together imagine
the situation of some first-order intentional sys-
tems, agents, which are the first of their kind.
They act according to their beliefs and desires.
They do so because the generative models im-
8 This section takes strong inspiration from Wilfrid Sellars’ section
“Our Rylean Ancestors” in Sellars (1963, p. 178).
6 | 11

plemented in their brains generate a sufficient
number of correct predictions about their envir-
onment for them to survive and procreate. They
do a fairly good job of avoiding harms and find-
ing food and mates. Since they are first-order
intentional systems, the behavior of their con-
specifics amounts to unexplained noise to them,
because they are unable to predict the patterns
of most of their behavior (which is what makes
them merely first-order intentional systems),
though they might well predict their behavior
as physical objects, e.g., where someone will
land if she falls off a cliff, for instance.
When resources are scarce, this leads to
competition between these agents and it be-
comes an advantage to be able to predict the
behavior of one’s conspecifics. This behavior is
by definition pretty complex (they are inten-
tional systems), but one can get some mileage
out of positing the following regularity: some
objects in the world have properties that lead to
predictable behavior in agents, e.g., if there is
an apple tree this will lead to the agents ap-
proaching it, if they are sufficiently near, etc.,
whereas if there is a predator, they will run
from it, etc. Their model of the world is popu-
lated by properties of items that allow the (ar-
guably rough) predictions of agent behavior.
One might indeed say that the desires of the
agents are projected 9 onto the world.10 Those
who acquire this ability are now 1.5 th order in-
tentional systems (see above; monkeys and
chimpanzees might turn out to be such, see
9 What I mean by “project” is that instead of positing an inner repres-
entation whose content is “I (the system in question) want to eat
that apple” and whose function is a desire, along with correct beliefs
about the current situation, what is posited is an eat-provocative
property of the apple itself. Both theoretical strategies allow for the
prediction of the same behavior. The crucial difference is that attrib-
uting new properties to objects that are already part of the model is
a simpler way of extending the model than positing a complex sys-
tem of internal states to each agent. Thus it is also more likely to
happen. It’s definitely much simpler than extending the model to in-
corporate all the entities that explain the behavior on a functional
level (i.e., all the neurons, hormones etc.). It is successful to the
same extent the intentional stance is successful, that is, in an argu-
ably noisy way, but still successful enough to gain an advantage
(since ex hypothesi all the conspecifics are intentional systems).
10 This is very close to Gibson’s affordances (e.g., Gibson 1986) in that
“values and meanings are external to the perceiver” (p. 127) and in a
couple of other respects (ibid.). It is, however, different in that the
postulated properties serve to predict the behavior of others and not
to guide the behavior of the organism itself. For the relation between
Gibsonian affordances and predictive processing see e.g., Friston et
al. (2012).
Baßler, D. H. (2015). Qualia explained away - A Commentary on Daniel C. Dennett.
In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570542
www.open-mind.net
Roskies this collection).11 However, findings in
this area are controversial. See Lurz 2010), since
they can predict the behavior of others, given
that their behavior is indeed explainable via ref-
erence to actually-existing objects, such as
apples or potential sexual partners. In addition
to these properties, there is a new category of
objects in “their world”: beings that react to
these properties in certain ways.12
In a next step we might suppose that a
system of communication or signaling evolves
(the details are not important), turning our in-
tentional systems of 1.5th order into communic-
ative agents. As communicative beings they
have an interest in hiding and revealing their
beliefs according to the trustworthiness of oth-
ers and their motives (cf. Dennett 2010). That
is, any of those beings needs to have access to
what it itself will do next, so that they can hide
or share this information, depending on inform-
ation about the other. One might think of hid-
ing the information about one’s desire to steal
some food, and so on.
This is a situation where applying the pre-
dictive strategy that was formerly only used to
explain the behavior of others to oneself becomes
an advantage for each of the agents.13 Agents like
this believe in the existence of a special kind of
special kind of properties, i.e., they predict their
own behavior on the basis of generative models
that posit such properties: they believe that they
approach apples because they are sweet, cuddle
babies because they are cute, laugh about jokes
because they are funny. Applying the strategy to
their own behavior puts them in the same cat-
egory (according to the generative model) as the
others: they are unified objects that react to cer-
11 “[R]ecent work on non-human primate theory of mind suggests that mon-
keys and chimpanzees have a theory of mind that represents goal states and
distinguishes between knowledge and ignorance of other agents (the presence
and absence of contentful mental representations), even if it fails to account
for misrepresentation.” (Roskies this collection, p. 12).
12 The selection of goals and other cognitive capabilities, etc., is all
placed outside of the target object (see footnote 9). It will approach
the object that has the highest attraction value, given that there is
no object with a higher repulsion value, i.e., there is no internal se-
lection process represented as internal selection. What makes other
agents special objects, in this model, is that they react to properties
that no other things react to, not that they have an internal life that
is somehow special.
13 Notice that according to PP, there is no shortcut to be taken: the
mind is a black box to itself—it has to infer its own properties just
as any others.
7 | 11

tain properties, not a bunch of cells trying to live
among one another.14
The agent-models of these beings might im-
prove by integrating the fact that sometimes it is
useful to posit non-existing entities or omit exist-
ing entities in order to predict the behavior of a
given conspecific (think of subjects in the false
belief-task looking in the wrong box). By this the
concept of (false) beliefs arises. One can imagine
how they further evolve into full-fledged second
and higher-order intentional systems, in an arms-
race for predicting their fellows.15
A further step: they develop sciences like we
did and will come to have a scientific image of the
world, which contains no special simple properties
of objects that cause “agents” to behave in cer-
tain ways. They come to the conclusion that the
brain does its job without taking notice of proper-
ties like cuteness or redness, “instead relying” on
computations, which take place in the medium of
spike trains and nothing but spike trains (cf. tar-
get, section 1). Their everyday predictions of oth-
ers and most importantly of themselves still rely
on the posited properties. And some might won-
der whether there isn’t something missing from
the scientific image.
According to the scientific image, they, as
biological organisms, react to photons, waves of
air, etc., but these are not the contents of their
own internal models employed in solving the con-
tinuous task of predicting themselves. The
simplest things they react to seem to be colors
and shapes, (perceived) sounds, etc. The reaction
towards babies is explained via facial proportions
and the like, but this is far from what their gener-
ative models “say”, which is “the reaction to ba-
bies is caused by their cuteness”.
They begin to build robots, which react to
babies like they do. They say things like, “all
this robot reacts to are the patterns in the
baby’s face, the proportions one can measure;
14 This is where one might speak of the origin of a self-model (Met-
zinger 2003) in some sense, where there is not only a model of the
body (built up by proprioceptive inputs) but also a model of the self
as having (primitive) goals, at least in any given moment.
15 Maybe language plays an important part in this further development
as an external scaffold (cf. Clark 1996; Dennett 1994). One fact sup-
porting this view is that monkeys do not seem to be able to under-
stand the concept of false belief (and therefore the concept of belief)
(cf. Marticorena et al. 2011, but also Lurz 2010 for an overview of
this debate).
Baßler, D. H. (2015). Qualia explained away - A Commentary on Daniel C. Dennett.
In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570542
www.open-mind.net
but although it reacts like we do, it does not do
so because of the baby’s cuteness”. Of course
only non-philosophers might say that science
misses a property of the baby, but philosophers
still see that there is something missing, and
since cuteness is not a property of the outside
world, they conclude that it must be a property
of the agents themselves.
This seems to me to be the current situ-
ation. We have the zombic hunch because it
seems to us that there is something missing and
it seems so because our generative models are
built upon the assumption that there are prop-
erties of things out there in the world to which
systems like us react in certain ways. We never
consider others like us to be zombies because
they are agents like us or better: we are systems
like them. We dismiss robots because we know
they can only react to measurable properties,
which do not seem to us to be the direct cause
of our behavior.
4 An analysis
Is it true that properties such as cuteness do
not correspond to anything? In a sense it is
false to deny that any such correspondence ex-
ists: such properties do correspond to the
cuddle-provocativeness of a baby, the eating-
provocativeness of an apple, etc., as a cause of
the behavior of agents. They are “lovely” prop-
erties (Dennett 1991, p. 379), and there is a way
to measure them: we can use ourselves as de-
tectors. But the reason we, intuitively, do not
accept a robot as a subject like ourselves is be-
cause we know how the robot does it: we know
that it calculates, maybe even in a PP-manner
—we know that it does not react directly to the
properties that seem to exist and that seem to
count. Neither do we, or the beings described
above. But their own prediction of themselves
treats such complex properties as simple, be-
cause there is nothing to be gained by being
more precise than is necessary for sufficiently
accurate prediction.16
This is my reconstruction of Dennett’s
claim that the mind projects its dispositions
16 This is also true of affordances (see e.g., Gibson 1986, p. 141).
8 | 11

onto the world via Bayesian prediction. I want
to draw attention to some of the features
ascribed to those properties that this story pre-
dicts:
1. These properties are “given directly”
to a person
The overall generative model depicts the
whole organism as a unified object that re-
acts directly to the posited properties in the
world. Any system that represents itself in
such a way is bound to believe that there are
properties of the world given directly to the
object, which it takes to be itself. In subper-
sonal terms this object and these properties,
as well as their relation to each other, are
postulated entities that explain the sensory
input. For instance, the fact that others talk
about the system as someone with beliefs and
desires (which is rooted in the same prin-
ciple) can be explained by predicting itself in
the same way.
2. These properties are irreducible to
physical‚ mechanical phenomena.
Since the generative model does not depict
these properties as built up from simpler
ones, but simply posits them to predict
lower-level patterns, these properties don’t
seem (to the system) to be reducible to other
properties.
3. These properties are atomic‚ i.e., un-
structured.
There are as many posited properties as
there are distinct dispositions to be tracked.
This also explains why one can learn to find
structure in formerly unstructured qualia (cf.
Dennett 1991, p. 49) once new discriminative
behavior is learned.
4. These properties are important to our
lives/beings as humans/persons
This felt importance is obvious, given the pu-
tative role they play in the explanation
provided by the generative model. These
properties seem to be the causes of all our
behavior: if one did not feel the painfulness
of a pain, one would not scream; if one did
not sense the funniness of a joke, one would
not laugh, etc. Since the model is still needed
for interacting with others, despite theoret-
Baßler, D. H. (2015). Qualia explained away - A Commentary on Daniel C. Dennett.
In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570542
www.open-mind.net
ical advances in the sciences this felt import-
ance of qualia to our lives is very difficult to
overcome.
5. These properties are known to every
living human being; it is not possible
to sincerely deny their existence
This is due to the fact that our brains pre-
dict the behavior of others via a model that
posits direct interaction between “agents”
and first-order, non-relational object proper-
ties—the entities that are then named
“qualia”.
This list has considerable overlap with lists of
features ascribed to qualia (e.g., Metzinger
2003, p. 68; Tye 2013), lending support to the
thesis that we don’t need a revolution in science
to accommodate qualia, but rather a change in
perspective: we might look at the creatures de-
scribed above and see that “[t]hey are us” (Den-
nett 2000, p. 353).
5 Conclusion
I have given an interpretation of Dennett’s the-
ory of why there seems to be something more to
consciousness than science can explain. My aim
was to thereby address crucial questions, while
sticking as closely to Dennett’s philosophy as
possible. The answer is a just-so story that
shows how (plausible) selection pressures lead
to beings that cannot help but believe that they
are more than just “moist robots” (Dennett
2013a, p. 49)—because some important entities
seem to be missing from the scientific descrip-
tion.
This story answers the questions why and
how beings like us monitor their dispositions,
and how this ability could have evolved. It also
offers an answer as to why we don’t recognize
them as representations of our dispositions and
why qualia are unlike other theoretical entities
in that they are important for what we consider
ourselves to be. The notion of an intermediate
between first- and second-order intentional sys-
tems was introduced as a new conceptual in-
strument for satisfying the acquisition con-
straint and to lay the fundaments for the belief
in mind-independent simple properties that dir-
9 | 11

ectly cause the behavior of agents. This in turn
is the basis for the belief in qualia as intrinsic
properties of experience.
This story might not provide an “insight
into necessity” (cf. Dennett 1991, p. 401), but I
am happy if it contributes to showing and clari-
fying a possibility: although it may seem that
our best hypothesis for accounting for our belief
in qualia is that they actually exist, this hypo-
thesis might still be explained away.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Thomas Metzinger and Jennifer
Windt for the unique opportunity to participate
in this project. I am also very grateful for the
helpful remarks they and two anonymous re-
viewers gave to an earlier version of this paper.
Baßler, D. H. (2015). Qualia explained away - A Commentary on Daniel C. Dennett.
In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570542
www.open-mind.net
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